[7] Guillermo del Toro presents this creepy tale about a little girl (Bailee Madison) who discovers evil creatures live in the ash pit beneath her father’s newly acquired mansion. While the creatures try to persuade the girl to join them, they frame her for destructive deeds, turning her dad (Guy Pearce) and his girlfriend (Katie Holmes) against her. As the girl falls into despair trying …
[5] After his little brother discovers a dead dog and a scary old man on a wooded shortcut, a new-teen-in-town (Drew Seeley) invites his friends to investigate the trail and the legend behind the mysterious old man who patrols it. The opening act of The Shortcut fails to generate any excitement for the story that lies ahead, one that’s a little less obvious than big …
[6] Liam Neeson stars as an ex-CIA operative who pursues sex traffickers in Paris to rescue his kidnapped daughter. Taken opens with twenty minutes of clunky, expository screenwriting before Neeson is allowed to kick things into high gear. He single-handedly rescues this formula potboiler with a performance of fierce determination. Not since the likes of Clint Eastwood has an actor threatened to find and kill …
[7] Writer/director Neil Burger (Divergent, The Illusionist) presents a futuristic story about children genetically engineered and sent into space on an 86-year mission to colonize a distant planet. Once they’re teenagers, however, the kids become too smart for their own good. When they realize their impulse control and libidos have been held at bay through medicated meals, they quit cold turkey. The once docile crew …
[6] An American (John Shepperd) visits his fiancée (Lynne Roberts) and her father in their rural chateau at the same time a series of murders begins. The father’s brutish gardener with a criminal past is a prime suspect. And so is his socially awkward servant, an immigrant from Java who holds a childlike adoration for the bride-to-be. Dr. Renault’s Secret is Twentieth Century Fox’s attempt …
[7] Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) directs this made-for-TV adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about a writer who discovers his hometown is being overtaken by vampires. The most remarkable thing about Hooper’s work here is how genuinely scary Salem’s Lot is without ever resorting to gore or excessive violence. Scenes of vampire children floating outside bedroom windows, beckoning their next victims to let …
[3] Horror maestro Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream) tackles voodoo and zombification in The Serpent and the Rainbow. Bill Pullman (Spaceballs) stars as an anthropologist sent to Haiti by a pharmaceutical company seeking the ingredients of a powder that is thought to give the living every appearance of being dead. Victims are buried alive while still hearing, seeing, and feeling everything. Along …
[7] Kerwin Mathews (The 7th Voyage of Sinbad) stars an American painter who strikes up an affair with mother and daughter barkeeps in rural France. He agrees to help them break their patriarch from an asylum where he’s been sentenced for murdering the daughter’s rapist with a blowtorch four years earlier. They go through with the plan, but come to regret it when they discover …
[7] Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl) gives a powerhouse performance as a ruthless, court-appointed legal guardian who preys upon her elderly wards, draining their savings and selling off their assets for her own financial gain. But she finally meets her match in an elderly woman (Dianne Wiest) with a mysterious past whose dangerous acquaintance (Peter Dinklage) threatens to topple the profiteering empire Pike has built for …
[3] Boris Karloff stars as a doctor who transplants the brain of a gangster into the body of a dying professor (both played by Stanley Ridges), then tries to get the convalescing professor to remember — with his new brain — where the gangster hid half a million dollars. Once they visit the gangster’s old stomping grounds, the memories come flooding back and the professor …
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